Du Bois

A Critical Introduction

Reiland Rabaka

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509519255, 9781509519248
• eBook ISBN: 9781509519286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

W.E.B Du Bois is widely considered one of the most accomplished and controversial African American intellectuals in U.S. history. A pioneering historian, sociologist, political economist, and civil rights activist, his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk remains one of the most widely read books in the history of American literature.

In this new book, Reiland Rabaka critically explores Du Bois's multidimensional legacy, lucidly introducing his main contributions in areas ranging from American sociology and critical race studies to black feminism and black Marxism. Rabaka argues that Du Bois's corpus, particularly when attention is given to his contributions to the critique of racism, sexism, capitalism and colonialism, can be persuasively interpreted as both an undeniable and unprecedented contribution to the origins and evolution of one of our most important contemporary critical concepts: intersectionality.

Du Bois: A Critical Introduction is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of history, sociology, politics, and economics. It will also be very valuable for those working in interdisciplinary fields, ranging from African American studies, critical race studies, and critical white studies to black feminism, black Marxism, and black internationalism.

1
The Philadelphia Negro: Early Work and the Inauguration of American Sociology

Du Bois’s urban sociology: The Philadelphia Negro

Building on, and decidedly going beyond, the methodological outline and orientation of his groundbreaking 1898 rural sociological work “The Negroes of Farmville,” W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro is widely considered his most comprehensive contribution to social science.¹ In many ways mirroring his discussion of the distinct history and heritage, racialization and criminalization, family life and conjugal conditions, education and illiteracy, and work and wages of the “country Negro” found in his Farmville study, The Philadelphia Negro added in-depth investigations of the disease and death rate, alcoholism and pauperism, electoral politics and religious practices of the “city Negro” to the incipient sociological enterprise. Much more methodical and meticulous than the rural study, almost 125 years after its publication, The Philadelphia Negro has garnered a unique place for itself in the annals of American social science. David Levering Lewis declared: “Some have made the debatable claim that The Philadelphia Negro is the first study of its kind in America, but its pride of place as the first scientific urban study of African Americans is as secure as the charge is misconceived that Du Bois’s book is largely derivative.”² Appearing to offer Lewis a rejoinder, sociologist Elijah Anderson exclaimed, “Du Bois’s work takes on seminal status not only for the study of the urban poor but also for the study of race in urban America. Indeed, it is in this sense that The Philadelphia Negro was truly the first work of its kind.” Then, concluding his contention with words that seem to dovetail with Lewis’s views, Anderson asserted, “It was the first [study] to seriously address and profoundly illuminate what was then known as the ‘Negro problem’” – the discourse on the civil rights and social roles of freedmen, freedwomen and their descendants in the US between the Reconstruction era (1865–77) and the World War II period (1939–45).³

Researched, written, and published under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania and its affiliated welfare organization, the College Settlement Association (CSA), The Philadelphia Negro bears the marks of Du Bois’s early elitism and emphasis on social reform. Partly on account of the white middle-class feminist paternalist reformism of the CSA – which, Lewis asserted, “was a feminist force to reckon with for civic leaders” – and partly owing to his own Eurocentrism, elitism, and assimilationism, Du Bois wrote “what amounted to two books in one – one that would not be immediately denounced or ridiculed by the arbiters of mainstream knowledge, influence, and order for its transparent heterodoxy; and a second one that would, over time, deeply penetrate the social sciences and gradually improve race relations policy through its not-immediately apparent interpretive radicalism.”⁴

The Philadelphia Negro is both a book of social science and a plan of social reform. It is divided into four parts: part one provides a history of African Americans in the city of Philadelphia; part two engages “their present condition considered as individuals”; part three, “their condition as an organized social group”; and, lastly, part four, “their physical and social environment.”⁵ Squarely aligning himself with turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressivism – the idea that advancements in science, technology, social organization, and economic development are integral to improving the human condition – for Du Bois The Philadelphia Negro was a case study for “practical reform” of African American living conditions.⁶ In other words, with The Philadelphia Negro he intended to offer solutions to the “Negro Problem.” However, one major weakness of the book is that it vacillates between Du Bois’s critique of the racial myths and social stereotypes swirling around recently emancipated African Americans and his obvious internalization of many of those same myths and stereotypes. To be specific, Du Bois sought to drive home the point of the “Negro group as a symptom” of their current conditions, and “not a cause.” African Americans in Philadelphia were a “striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime.”⁷ But, Du Bois’s own words in The Philadelphia Negro often reveal flashes of his embrace of Victorian moralism and elitism in his conception of social science in the interest of social reform.

Wedding history with sociology, Du Bois developed comprehensive questionnaires to capture the conditions of individuals, family relations, education, and employment. Working “morning, noon, and night,” as he detailed in his autobiography, Du Bois personally interviewed 5,000 people.⁸ His research was rigorous and the data he presented was exhaustive, touching on the ethos and central social institutions of the African American community. He was particularly adept at the presentation of statistics on African American health, marriage, family units, literacy, education, employment, religion, and crime. To fully comprehend the African American experience in Philadelphia at the dawn of the twentieth century, Du Bois believed his readers needed historical grounding. Hence, chapters III and IV of The Philadelphia Negro are devoted entirely to the history of African Americans in Philadelphia. Drawing on his graduate training at Harvard and the University of Berlin, for Du Bois sociology was more than mere analysis of the present social, political, and economic situation. The present is inextricable from the past in Du Bois’s thought, and one of the most defining moments of African Americans’ past was their enslavement. Consequently, he stressed “one cannot study the Negro in freedom and come to general conclusions about his destiny without knowing his history in slavery.”⁹ The Philadelphia Negro demonstrates that the most rewarding sociology for Du Bois is historical sociology, combined historical and sociological research that pays careful attention to the incessant evolution of the social organization, political practices, economics, and cultural traditions of a people. At this early point in his work, Du Bois strongly believed that systematic sociological inquiry, coupled with a detailed historical understanding and cultural comprehension of a social group, could provide the basis for a concrete plan and program of social reform.

Nevertheless, Du Bois’s commitment to black progress was often undercut by his elitism. The Philadelphia Negro shows traces of his – however subtle – digestion and indelicate application of a homespun intra-racial Social Darwinistic elitism where the “better class” of blacks – the “talented few” in his words – were purportedly destined to rise above, and eventually rule over, the “low civilization” of the “great mass of Negroes.” For instance, Du Bois ironically wrote, “there are many Negroes who are as bright, talented and reliable as any class of [white] workmen, and who in untrammeled competition would soon rise high in the economic scale, and thus by the law of the survival of the fittest we should soon have left at the bottom those inefficient and lazy drones who did not deserve a better fate.”¹⁰ Inexcusable elitism and assimilationism fill the pages of The Philadelphia Negro but, despite this, it has been repeatedly hailed – by black and white alike, bourgeois and proletarian – as a seminal text in the history and development of American sociology.¹¹

Unquestionably contradictory and controversial, Du Bois’s sociology was ultimately social policy-preoccupied and social praxis-promoting. Seemingly more concerned with “getting the facts straight” than with avoiding hurting black or white folks’ feelings, The Philadelphia Negro spared nothing and no one in its quest to provide new, empirically based knowledge in the interests of social, political, and institutional transformation. Long before European American sociology sought to couple social theory with social praxis, Du Bois, literally, laid the foundations for liberation sociology in the United States.¹² In fact, part of what really and truly distinguishes Du Bois’s sociological legacy from those of his European and European American sociological forebears and contemporaries is his still easily detected determination, and the unmistakable passion with which he deconstructed and reconstructed the then-inchoate empirical social scientific research methods in the interests of African Americans.

In essence, what Du Bois’s early sociological work presents us with are the theoretical trials and tribulations, the conceptual growing pains, of his initial efforts to conceive, first, an African American and, later, a Pan-African critical theory specific to the special social, political, and economic needs of black folk. However, it should be underscored that it was not merely Du Bois’s combination of social science and social reform that led him to “ambiguities, exaggerations, and biases.”¹³ More critically, what makes Du Bois’s “ambiguities, exaggerat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Du Bois’s Lifework
• 1 The Philadelphia Negro: Early Work and the Inauguration of American Sociology
• 2 The Souls of Black Folk: Critique of Racism and Contributions to Critical Race Studies
• 3 “The Souls of White Folk”: Critique of White Supremacy and Contributions to Critical White Studies
• 4 “The Damnation of Women”: Critique of Patriarchy, Contributions to Black Feminism, and Early Intersectionality
• 5 Black Reconstruction: Critique of Capitalism, Contributions to Black Marxism, and Discourse on Democratic Socialism
• Conclusion: Du Bois’s Legacy
• Index
• End User License Agreement